How Do You Cope With Your Child’s Insomnia? Try These 5 Tips From Someone Who Has Been There
Key takeaways:
After a frustrated mother tried everything she could think of to help her 7-year-old sleep through the night, a chiropractor finally did the trick.
When a child is struggling with sleep issues, self-care for the caretakers is key.
If you’re considering chiropractic care for your child, make sure your provider has been specially trained in how to care for young, growing bodies.
It’s normal for infants to wake up multiple times throughout the night. But what if that schedule of waking up two, three, four, or even five times a night continued for 7 years?
That’s what Bay Area yoga teacher and writer Alyssa Lauren Stone and her husband faced when their daughter was struggling with insomnia. Always a restless, noisy sleeper, she woke the whole family multiple times a night.
During this time, Alyssa maintained a strict self-care routine to deal with her exhaustion. She tried everything she could think of to help her daughter sleep better, including blackout blinds, melatonin, and even surgery to reduce her daughter’s enlarged adenoids. But nothing helped much until Alyssa finally took her daughter to a pediatric chiropractor.
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1. Try everything — from melatonin to blackout blinds
As big believers in the benefits of a good night’s sleep, Alyssa and her husband sleep-trained their baby daughter at around 6 months old. They thought they had the whole sleep thing cracked until two months later, when their daughter started teething. She began waking up multiple times a night. And she never stopped. Even at the age of 7, she wasn’t sleeping through the night.
In their quest for a good night’s sleep, the family tried everything, including blackout blinds, melatonin, a sound machine, a humidifier, and limiting their daughter’s water consumption before bed in case she was waking up because she needed to use the toilet.
“We really created the most optimal sleep environment for anyone. Like, I would fall asleep in her room probably in an instant,” Alyssa reports, laughing. “But, for her, it was just always a struggle.”
2. If that fails, seek out specialists
When Alyssa’s daughter started nursery school, at around age 3, she was constantly sick. Worried, Alyssa talked to her pediatrician, who referred her to an ear, nose, and throat specialist (ENT). The ENT discovered that Alyssa’s daughter had an issue with her eustachian tubes, which connect the ears and throat. The tubes were lying at an unusual angle, so fluid and mucus weren’t draining properly. The ENT recommended surgery.
During the surgery to correct the issue, the doctors discovered that Alyssa’s daughter’s adenoids (tissues toward the back of the throat) were also enlarged, which can make breathing more difficult. So they reduced the size of her adenoids during the surgery as well.
Alyssa and her husband hoped the surgery to deal with their daughter’s endless colds would also help improve her breathing — and her sleep. But while their daughter stopped getting sick as often, the nightly sleeplessness mostly continued.
“I thought, This is gonna be it, the magic pill that enables her to finally sleep. It wasn't,” Alyssa remembers.
3. Make sure the caregivers are caring for themselves
By this stage, years of broken sleep were taking a toll on the whole family. Alyssa’s daughter was still cheerful during the day and hitting all her developmental milestones, despite her sleep issues. But her parents were struggling.
“It was very tiring,” Alyssa says. “The worst of it was during the pandemic. We’re all going through something we’ve never experienced, and we were having sleep issues on top of that. So, personally, it really caused me to think twice about my life in general. Like, is this the way we should live? And I constantly answered the question, ‘No, this is not.’”
To deal with her exhaustion in the short term, Alyssa relied on a strict self-care routine. “I do a lot of self-care, like meditation, acupuncture, and yoga,” she says. “I had to carve out additional time during the day to let my body rest, because I wasn’t getting the proper amount of sleep at night.”
In the longer term, she kept pushing her daughter’s medical team for answers. “I didn’t want to accept it as our norm. I didn’t want to accept it as the cards that we were dealt. So I never gave up looking for answers,” she says.
4. Don’t rule out chiropractic care
Since the family is based in the Bay Area, south of San Francisco, they had access to world-class doctors at nearby Stanford University. Alyssa says her daughter’s medical team never stopped listening and never dismissed their concerns. Eventually, one of these healthcare providers had a breakthrough suggestion.
Alyssa’s daughter’s pediatric dentist noticed that she had a slight crossbite, which made it hard for her to fully close her mouth. The dentist said the crossbite put her at risk for sleep apnea. “And that’s when alarm bells went off,” Alyssa says. “I was like, ‘OK, what do we do?’”
After using 2D and 3D images to get a better sense of what was going on, her daughter’s dentist recommended a mouth spacer to correct the crossbite and suggested visiting a chiropractor as well. Alyssa was worried at first. “My impression of chiropractic care was cracking bones. She was like, ‘Oh, no, this is really gentle. It’s not harsh in any way, because children’s bodies are actually more malleable,’” Alyssa says.
The family’s insurance covered chiropractic care (though not the mouth spacer, because that was categorized as elective orthodontia). Reassured, Alyssa and her husband decided to give the chiropractor a try.
They took their daughter to a specially trained pediatric chiropractor, who immediately noticed that the sphenoid bone in her skull, behind her eyes, was tilted unevenly. “Within three treatments of seeing a chiropractor, my daughter started sleeping through the night,” Alyssa says. This was before the mouth spacer the family had ordered even arrived.
Excited but cautious, Alyssa began using a calendar to track when her daughter slept through the whole night. At first, it was two nights a week. Now it’s up to four or five nights a week.
5. Find a properly trained pediatric chiropractor
Impressed with these results, Alyssa spoke to her daughter’s chiropractor and learned that many of the children treated in that office have sleep issues. She says she wishes more families struggling with childhood sleep problems were aware that this kind of care might be an option. Though she cautions, “You really have to find someone who is properly trained, someone who has studied those extra hours of pediatrics and is really gentle.”
Alyssa has kind words for her daughter’s doctors, but she says she wishes medical professionals were a little more open to collaborating with alternative practitioners and discussing treatment options outside their specialties. “I believe in both Western and Eastern medicine, and I feel like both sides could talk to each other a little bit more,” she says. That way, she says, families like hers could find answers more quickly.
Alyssa tells her story so that other parents of kids who struggle with sleep don’t give up hope.
If you keep pushing for answers, you may just find that magic bullet, Alyssa says, but make sure you keep looking after yourself while you’re searching.
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